A Recent Back-Out-of-Whack Episode

Americans of the Baby Boomer generation learned very little about how to grow old gracefully, or paid attention to what was in store for us as our bodies began reminding us it was our turn to Be Older.

I’m one of the Boomer Generation’s Fortunate Few who’s been sailing through his 60s
without any major (or even minor) physical ailments or crises, but last month brought a big ol’ Wake Up Call in the You’d-Better-Stop-Pretending-You’re-Still-in-Your-40s Department.

Probably because all my life I’ve had terrible posture, I would occasionally – every every five to seven years? – “throw out” my back as a result of doing some bizarre or careless thing. (Helping a friend move a heavy, unwieldy sofa backwards down a set of stairs, for example.) In the good ol’ days of my youth, it would take a day or two or three for my back to heal itself and for me to function normally (pain-free) again. Although I do remember the temporary bouts of back pain caused by these episodes, I don’t think I ever missed a day of work because of them.

Well, sometime in late July, I wrenched my back yet again. I’m fairly sure it happened on a morning after several consecutive days of sitting at my home computer way too long peering down into The Rabbit Hole (otherwise known as The Internet my computer screen). When I finally interrupted my hypnotic trance to go outside to water my parched vegetables, I must have contorted my aching back when I bent down and reached behind a bush to turn on the water spigot.

Bam! Out went the back. The pain was sufficiently intense and persistent for me to abruptly cancel a much-anticipated trip to the mountain cabin later that morning – even though I had already packed the truck for my trip!

In addition to spending many tedious hours lying on a heating pad, what helped relieve some of the pain initially was something my also-plagued-with-back-problems friend Ted had told me about several months ago, the “Thera Cane.” Having recently purchased one for myself, this remarkable (and reasonably priced) back-poking, muscle-massaging device soon became my New Best Friend.

A few days and several heating-pad sessions and hundreds of back-poking machinations later, my sister Gayle (a retired nurse), suggested I immediately begin taking Ibuprofin. (As usual, taking medicine of any kind hadn’t occurred to my medicine-avoiding self.) When the Ibuprofin didn’t take care of the problem after a few days and things seemed, in fact, to be getting worse, my friend and neighbor Charles, a massage therapist, kindly brought over to my house his portable massage table and helped me up onto it. Charles’s ministrations along with the Ibuprofit helped quell the chronic pain in my back enough to get me through the trip to Oregon in early August that Gayle and I made to attend my niece’s wedding.

The week after returning from Oregon, however, I promptly managed to screw up my almost-healed back again, this time by bending over a little too quickly to load some dirty clothes into the washing machine located under my kitchen counter. (Again, this happened after spending too many consecutive hours on several consecutive days sitting in front of The Rabbit Hole.)

Finding myself back to square one, I hauled out the heating pad and the Thera Cane again and convinced myself I was feeling better enough to risk a belated trip to the mountain cabin. Wrong. By the time I extricated myself from my truck after the two-hour drive, I could barely hobble inside. My cabin-visiting friend Randall offered to take me to the emergency room of the local hospital if I didn’t feel better the following morning. When I felt worse that next morning rather than any better, I gingerly climbed into his exasperatingly low-roofed car and off we went.

A few hours later, I skeptically took my first dose of Tramadol, the pain-blocking medication the merciful emergency room doctor had prescribed for me. A half-hour later, and much to my amazement and delight, zero pain!

Well, until the medication wore off, anyway. I obtained enough of those magic pills to get me back to Atlanta without suffering, followed by another spell of lying down a lot each day on a heating pad, prodding my poor spine with the Thera Cane, and minimizing my sitting (as sitting was so painful).

With a much-anticipated (and already paid-for!) trip to Ireland looming in the not-too-distant future, and concerned that my back wasn’t healing, Charles recommended I seek the help of a chiropractor, and he graciously drove me to my first appointment on August 17th.

And that’s where 2016’s Saga of the Bad Back finally began winding down. I immediately felt better after my first visit to the Atlanta Chiropractic & Wellness Center – located (thank goodness) less than two miles from my house. (Another useful feature of the wonderful neighborhood I’m lucky enough to be living in.)

Six chiropractic treaments later, I can report that not only can I sit, stand, walk, and sleep normally, but I’ve already been able to once again drive up to and back from the mountain cabin with minimal discomfort. I’ll be getting one more chiropractic treatment before the Ireland trip, and, unless I’m careless on the boat my friends and I will be steering for a week down that country’s Shannon River, I should be fine. (For insurance, I’m taking along with me on my trip what’s left of the Tramadol.)

Lessons Learned

Things that used to clear up/heal quickly when one is young, or youngish, take longer to clear up/heal when you’re older. Sometimes a lot longer than is convenient.

Your backbone is your friend. Treat it carelessly, or meet with some bad luck, and your entire routine can be suddenly, radically, and unpleasantly altered for an exasperatingly indeterminate amount of time. Even the simplest things, or, worse, the things you take completely for granted that you would be able to do under almost any circumstances, you may have to do completely without for a while. Things as simple as reading a book, for Pete’s sake, or playing a game of Scrabble, or sitting at a computer, or climbing in and out of a vehicle. (Strange as it might sound, I felt lucky I owned a motor scooter as well as a pickup truck – riding the scooter was uncomfortable when it wasn’t impossible, but it sure beat climbing into and out of a truck.)

Being laid up with a bad back when you’re retired, as I am, may be boring or annoying, but it’s certainly easier to cope with pain when you’re a retiree than it would be if you still workedfull-time. I feel so lucky that this episode happened recently instead of, say, five years ago.

What people (well, Amercans, anyway) say about feeling isolated and abandoned when they can no longer drive? Well, it’s true! I enjoy spending time at home, but I certainly didn’t enjoy spending as much time at home as I spent there during August!

When you aren’t hurting, even previously boring chores can seem like positive pleasures. Who knew that going to the grocery store – being able to go there, or anywhere – could be so much fun? Apart from the unexpected joys of getting out of the house, even climbing out of bed, pain free, to brush your teeth can suddenly become an exhilarating experience.

Be glad we live in a time that includes pain-killing pharmaceuticals. Yes, there are dangers for some people under some circumstances to abusing prescribed drugs, but, man, am I ever grateful that such potions exist and that they work so well. It was so nice to have a few breaks from hurting before the cause of the hurting (whatever it was) got dealt with.

No matter how skeptical you may be of chiropractors, don’t be like Cal and wait way too long to seek one out if everything else you’ve tried isn’t working! (One of the many, many ways I’m more fortunate than many Americans is that I can afford medical insurance, and that I happen to have a policy that covers the cost of chiropractic treatment (except for a $15 per visit co-pay). And that miracle-working bottle of Tramadol? It cost me less than $2 because of my medical insurance. Everyone (especially if you live in the United States) is not so lucky. Political aside here: When it comes to being a hostage to pain, luck shouldn’t have anything to do with it. My current favorite political slogans are “Universal Health Insurance Now!” and “Get Those Capitalists Far Away from Health Care!”

The Bad Back Saga has magnified my gratitude for the wonderful friends I have. All of them who heard about my predicament made much-appreciated sympathetic noises, several friends offered their help in various ways, and Charles extended himself numerous times and in numerous ways to help me get to the other side of this whole thing. (Bless his heart, Charles made time for us to play several diverting games of Scrabble, even when I had to play standing up.)

As with any visitation of pain or with any illness, coping with a whacked-out back was an “interesting” rehearsal for what it must be like to be a Really Old Person. It was certainly good practice for the time that’s coming for all of us when we will need to ask for help more often than we’d like – and to accept some of those offers. My ailing back also served as a reminder to be helpful myself to ailing friends, most of whom, like me, are used to living independently and are loathe to depend upon the kindnesses of others.

As I have mentioned before on this blog, one of life’s great unacknowledged miracles is the astonishing fact that (for most of us) humans are such flexible, mobile creatures! We can (most of us) walk, we can sit, we can twist and turn, we can dance, attend tai chi classes if we want, even – if we’ve a mind to – crawl around on our bellies like reptiles. This episode certainly reminded me of how oblivious I usually am of this amazing feature of being human.

The activities I am used to doing frequently because I have always loved doing them – reading, gardening, spending time with friends, traveling – I am currently enjoying even more than I already did, as I’ve been unexpectedly and dramatically reminded not to take these activities and opportunities – as well as “mere” mobility – for granted. I will surely forget this insight – probably sooner than I know. But I’ve certainly been keenly aware recently how wonderful it is that I am usually fit enough to do the things I love whenever I want to. For a while at least, my modest pleasures are seeming even more pleasurable than were previously.

Dear Readers, mind your posture! And enjoy whatever good or fair-to-middling health you currently or usually enjoy, and enjoy whatever activities that health allows you to do, and pursue with gusto whatever interests you enjoy pursuing, for ye may not be perpetually healthy and spry!

11 thoughts on “A Recent Back-Out-of-Whack Episode”

I swear by my regular chiropractic visits, my massage therapist and cupping sessions as preventative and relief. My body is something I also have been hit with as I get up in the years as having to take special care. Increase exercise is part of my goal. Thanks for your reality check on this concern.

Long time chiro fan here. A Parisian chiro finally figure out I should stop doing push ups as it was causing or exacerbating my shoulder pain (the latter, as it turns out). Glad you got some help! And drugs! Once had tooth pain while in Mexico and only an opioid (spell?) helped. Got an injection at the emergency room and a prescription too.

Very well-written meditation or relection on health. You are so right about the joy of modest pleasures or even of things that are normally chores and how we appreciate them when we can’t participate. And did I even think to ask if I could do a round of grocery shopping for you?

Yeah, the pain did spread down my leg a bit toward the end of All That, but I’m back in the saddle again and ready for Ireland! And, yep, those pain-blockers are amazing! (Will be taking a stash with me on our trip, Just In Case.)

Oh, Roger, that was just one of many similar episodes, and only that one involved helping you. (I’ve helped a lot of people move in my time – something I’ve given up forever!) That sofa-moving for you was just the most recent back-related hoo-hah I could remember. And it was mild compared to what happened to me this summer!

Count thyself fortunate! You just happen to have a sister who is a retired RN. You just happen to have a good friend who happens to be a massage therapist. The RNs in my family live away – one in Savannah, one in Macon, and are both still working. One of them I have consulted by phone in the past, to get her take on something about my mother or me, but it isn’t as if she can just hop over and help me.

Anyway – you know my sympathies are with you. When one’s back hurts, one hurts all over. I hope it is all healed now.

Yep, I think I’m good to go, finally. Had my next-to-last chiropractic treatment this afternoon; will get one more before the Ireland trip, just for good measure (it’s a long plane ride to Ireland!). And you’re right, I’m a lucky fella, and not just in terms of when I fall ill (which is, in another great stroke of good luck, very seldom). Thanks for reading the blogpost.

From Cal’s Commonplace Book

The Constant Reader

Books Read This Year

Updated November 13, 2018

“I continue to think of myself as someone who is essentially a reader—a man who takes a deep pleasure in good books, who views reading as a fine mode of acquiring experience, and who still brings the highest expectations to what he reads. By the highest expectations I mean that I am perhaps a naïve person who has never ceased to believe that books can change his life, and decisively so.” – Joseph Epstein (from Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives [1989], quoted by Patrick Kurp at his blog Anecdotal Evidence)

Just Finished:

Tyrant: Shakespeare and Politics (2018) by Stephen Greenblatt

One of the joys of browsing the New Books shelf at my local library is discovering that one of my favorite authors has published a new book. When I recently stumbled upon Stephen Greenblatt’s latest, I instantly put aside everything else I was reading to start it. Tyrant, like his earlier The Swerve and even earlier Will in the World, is a tour de force. Very little that I’ve read since Mr. Trump was elected President has helped me better cope with this colossal blunder of the U.S. electorate (actually, the Electoral College), but Tyrant helps a lot. Greenblatt wrote it to cope with his own dismay at Trump and his allegedly widespread and numerous supporters. It’s a short book, but it is full of spot-on observations about the parallels between Mr. Trump and Shakespeare’s Richard II, Macbeth, Lear, and Coriolanus. And of course makes me even more impressed with Shakespeare’s penetrating insight into human nature, and Greenblatt’s ability to marshall those insights into such a compelling study.

Currently reading (in addition to trying to keep up with the recent issues of the planet’s two best magazines, The Sun and the New Yorker):

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978) by Barbara Tuchman

Finished earlier this year:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2009) by Rebecca Skloot

If most nonfiction books were written this well, people would read fewer novels! Once I started this tale (for my book club), it was difficult to put it down until I finished it. It took ten years for Skloot to write this first book of hers; I hope I won’t have to wait that long before she writes another one, so I can read it also, regardless of what she decides to write about. Skloot is that good – and the amount of research that went into her writing is as impressive as her riveting writing style.

Several of this prolific author’s previous bestselling books (The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, The Care of the Soul, A Religion of One’s Own,A Blue Fire: Selected Writings of James Hillman) have been on my To Be Read list, so when I found his latest at the library the other day, I figured I might as well finally get around to reading him – especially since this latest one addressed one of my more recent preoccupations: books about mindful retirement. I can understand why Moore’s books have been so popular: his style is very conversational and his arguments are non-combative and often persuasive, especially when Moore’s explaining Jungian-based theories of meaning (some of which – and with the pronounced exception of dream analysis) have held a long-time fascination for me). But I was surprised to find myself disappointed in this book. Perhaps I’ve already internalized most of the insights and advice on offer here, or I find Moore too repetitive, or both. Since I’ve already bought copies of those other books of Moore’s, I will eventually get around to examining them, but maybe not as soon as I was hoping to?

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (2016) by Sarah Bakewell

If there were ever an ideal book for Calvin to read, this must be it: it’s nonfiction, features multiple historical figures who are legends in the fields of philosophy and psychology (my two college majors and the two subjects that have most enthralled me all my life), told by a master story-teller who had already written another of my favorite books (How to Live: or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer). The full subtitle of the book includes the names of the figures whose lives and works Bakewell covers: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Bakewell’s masterpiece is a perfect blend of difficult concepts rendered understandable, meticulous historical research, fascinating backstories and spellbinding gossip, compelling speculation supported by startling insights – all of it produced in the most engaging prose imaginable. My highest praise for any book is that I know long before I finish reading it that I’m going to want to read it again, and this borrowed library book is one that I will definitely be buying my own copy of.

My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues (2017) by Pamela Paul

This memoir of how an introverted book nerd became editor of the New York Times Book Review is interlaced with remarkably articulate (and often humorous) asides on the pleasures and perils of book love. Paul entertainingly captures the complete range of often difficult-to-describe experiences with reading that every lifetime reader will recognize with glee (or chagrin). I am so glad I found this writer and this book (one of several she’s written).

The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (2008) by Mikita Brottman

Brottman is a psychotherapist and literature professor, and her book is an intriguing tonic for diehard bookaholics like me. The first half of her book, before she ventures more thoroughly into her personal reading habits and history, is the most interesting section, although the entire book held my interest. The striking parallels Brottman draws between the activities (often addictions) of reading and masturbation – and the similarities between the changed social attitudes about both – are compellingly and often amusingly described. Brottman’s humble but erudite writing style is engaging regardless of the specific literary territory she’s surveying, and she surveys a lot of them (e.g., science fiction, Gothic romances, true crime, comic books, psychological case studies). Every chapter of the book contains insights and shocks of self-recognition. The author’s list of works cited and consulted is fascinating, her list of relevant Internet sites is particularly useful), and her Acknowledgements page is as hilarious as it is unusual.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit is one of my favorite living writers, and this is the second time I’ve read this book: I read a library copy nine years ago – and, mortifyingly didn’t remember a word of it, just the fact that I remembered loving it. Late last summer, when I began taking long walks most days to build up my stamina for my then-upcoming trip to Italy, I bought a copy of Wanderlust and am so glad I did. Not only because it took me so long to finish it (I took it with me to Italy, but didn’t get around to as much reading as I’d planned to do), but because Solnit includes so many excellent quotations about walking, which I am planning to add (eventually) to the Commonplace Book posted elsewhere on my blog. Another unusual thing about Wanderlust is how each magnificent chapter could stand alone as an essay on a particular aspect of the history or psychology of walking: one wouldn’t need to read the chapters sequentially. The angles Solnit comes at her subject from are often unexpected ones, and many of her own sentences are also definitely quoteworthy. I won’t be surprised if I decide one day to read this book again for a third time – it’s that rich, that dense with insight and information. And I will certainly track down Solnit’s more recent books, some of which are probably based on screeds on her Facebook page (and elsewhere).

Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995) by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

A whale of a book (563 pages, excluding the notes), but completely enthralling – Richardson’s channeling of Emerson’s motivations and abiding interests are subtle and convincing. I soon got so exasperated at the number of intriguing (and obscure) book titles that Richardson mentions that Emerson read that I ended up buying a copy of the book so I can refer to it more conveniently. (Originally, I obtained my copy of this book from the library, after unearthing, late last year, a review of Richardson’s book that I’d saved from a 1995 (!) New Yorker.) I will definitely be investigating Richardson’s other books, which include a biography of Thoreau. And I am glad I at some point picked up a copy of Emerson’s selected essays, as I am now definitely going to read some of them. What an amazing mind – an authentic pioneer of the intellect – and from now on a personal hero.

I originally read this book ten years ago and recently re-read it after suggesting it to the book club I’m a member of. Shocking as it was to realize I’d forgotten all the details of the story, it was gratifying to find that my fond memories of its being one of those near-perfect novels were reinforced by a second reading. The fact that a former librarian (and her niece) wrote the book, and wrote it in the form of letters and journal entries made its near-perfection even sweeter. Our book club is looking forward to the movie based on the book that’s being released this year, hoping the screenwriter(s) didn’t mangle what is likely one of the most delightful novels you’ll ever read. Plus you’ll learn a lot about the five-year Nazi occupation of this British island, something I was unaware of until I stumbled upon this book.